Blackberry Message In The Dead Of The Night: Crackberries Are No More

Photo by Kt38138, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Like Langston Hughes once famously wrote:

“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a physical QWERTY message unsent…”

Or something:

CNN:

You soon won’t be able to use that old BlackBerry phone sitting at the bottom of your drawer somewhere.

Starting Tuesday, January 4, the company will stop running support for its classic devices running BlackBerry 10, 7.1 OS and earlier. This means all of its older devices not running on Android software will no longer be able to use data, send text messages, access the internet or make calls, even to 911.

While most mobile users have moved on from BlackBerry — the last version of its operating system launched in 2013 — the move to discontinue support for its phones represents the end of what was once considered bleeding-edge technology.
The company originally announced the news in September 2020 as part of its efforts to focus on providing security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world under the name BlackBerry Limited.

BlackBerry (BB) has been mostly out of the phone business since 2016, but over the years it continued to license its brand to phone manufacturers, including TCL and more recently OnwardMobility, an Austin, Texas-based security startup, for a 5G Blackberry device running on Android software. (BlackBerry’s Android devices are not affected by the end of service.)

BlackBerry’s old school cell phones with physical keyboards from the late 1990s and early 2000s were once so popular people nicknamed them “CrackBerries.” The keyboard appealed to professionals who wanted the flexibility of working outside the office with some of the tools they used on a desktop computer.

The devices became a status symbol and fixture for people on Wall Street, celebrities like Kim Kardashian, and even President Barack Obama, thanks in part to its great reputation for security. At its peak in 2012, BlackBerry had more than 80 million active users.
The company got its start in 1996 as Research In Motion with what it called two-way pagers. Its first gadget, the “Inter@ctive Pager,” allowed customers to respond to pages with a physical keyboard, a kind of text messaging/email hybrid. Three years later, RIM introduced the BlackBerry name with the BlackBerry 850.

Eventually, BlackBerry phones gained support for email, apps, web browsing and BBM, an encrypted text messaging platform that predated WhatsApp and survived long after BlackBerry was surpassed by its rivals.

But Apple’s touchscreen revolution with the iPhone in 2007 made BlackBerry’s offerings appear lacking. It tried touch screens and slide-out keyboard models, with little success. It developed a few phones with no physical keyboard, but those were missing BlackBerry’s key differentiator: its tactile keyboard.

For a while there the fastest thing on earth was the opposable thumbs of a harried Blackberry user jabbing the QWERTY like their life depended on it. Some folks, myself included, had periods of their life where two Blackberry phones were carried as the official one and the personal one needed to be kept separate. President Obama famously refused to give his up upon taking his place behind the Resolute Desk despite folks voicing security concerns. The term “Crackberries” entered the lexicon of the common folk, the pulpits of the preachers that tech was ruining everything, and punchlines of jokes in the before time when memes where not yet upon us.

Alas, touch screens took over the world, and even the die-hard button pushers eventually made way to the smooth, soulless cases of technology that no longer required the tactile relationship between man and machine. Just touch, or wave at it, or speak to it, no further effort required. They call this progress, this march towards faster, better, less touchy. Perhaps it is. But there are those of us that remember, and our thumbs remember, a time when human achievement was measured not by your appearance, or creed, or background but by your ability to appease a higher up from anywhere you could get signal that yes, you were still working on it.

Like all great things, time has passed the Blackberry by. It had its moment, a glorious moment when the world ran through QWERTY and the excellent Blackberry Messenger, training an entire generation on the communication methods to come. The Blackberry has gone from the “it” device to a “what is that” of baffled yutes wondering how you could ever do TikTok videos without a forward-facing camera. The end of the Blackberry isn’t a loss of innocence, nor is it a revolutionary moment in technology. But it definitely was a critical stage in the adolescence of the fully integrated technological age that is now fully maturing.

Call it progress, that we now need only one thumb. Onward.